Repositories with Realm

Realm 0.87 (for Android) came with a very important change: It introduced detached copies of RealmObjects. You can create a detached object using Realm.copyFromRealm. Any setter operation on a detached object won’t update the database so they can be called without opening a Realm transaction. In addition the detached objects are accessible from any thread.

We refactored our app code to use repositories and setup the following rules:

• The UI only fetches realm objects via a repository (no more Realm code in Activities).
• Repositories always return detached objects
• Detached objects have to be saved using the save method in the repository.

Here’s a simple example repository:

public FooRepository {
 
    private Realm realm;
    
    public FooRepository(Realm realm) {
       this.realm = realm;  
    }
 
    public Foo getFooById(String fooId) {
        Foo foo = realm
                 .where(Foo.class)
                 .equalTo("id",fooId)
                 .findFirst();
        return realm.copyFromRealm(foo);
    }
    
    public void save(Foo detachedObjectToSave) {
       // isValid() always returns false on detached objects.
       if (object.isValid()) { 
          throw new IllegalArgumentException("received realm object is not a detached object");
       }

       realm.beginTransaction();
       realm.copyToRealmOrUpdate(object);
       realm.commitTransaction();
       // please note that this also could be saved 
       // in background using Realms asynchronous transactions.
    }
}